A groundbreaking study of Elizabethan anti-Semitism that offers a
shockingly long pedigree for Shakespeare's Shylock. Shapiro
(English and Comparative Literature/Columbia Univ.) takes on the
accepted opinion that there were no English Jews and few resources
in Shakespeare's era from which to draw the leading Jewish villain
in The Merchant of Venice, arguing that even after their expulsion
from England in 1290, Jews remained in sufficient numbers to
"represent the threat of both cultural and personal miscegenation."
Testimony from the Spanish Inquisition offers references to
postexpulsion Jews in British records, if only when they converted
to Christianity or broke the law. Shapiro cites diaries, sermons,
and political tracts documenting the British obsession with secret
Jews, marranos from Iberia and "false Christians," who somehow
threatened a coalescing sense of Britishness. In the prevailing
paranoia, Queen Elizabeth Tudor herself was accused of being a
secret Jew. While no actual legislation has survived to confirm
official government policy toward Jews, archival evidence proves
that Tudor kings allowed small groups of Jews, who served as
merchants, Hebrew teachers, and physicians, to remain in the
country. Shapiro's case is solidified with an array of 16th- and
17th-century allusions to Jews (none positive or neutral) in Tudor
and Stuart drama, backed up with gleanings from diaries, travel
literature, and political, religious, and commercial tracts. All
the vicious accusations, from desecration of the host to well
poisonings and ritual murder, "serve[d] both as threat and a
confirmation of Christianity." Shapiro explores the pathology of
these charges, but outside of his view of the "pound of flesh" as a
reference to forced circumcision (or emasculation), there is little
meat here for the Shakespeare scholar. Although not the
Shakespearean study it professes to be, Shapiro's exhaustively
researched work adds much to the history of anti-Semitism and to
our understanding of xenophobia's role in the creation of the
British psyche. (Kirkus Reviews)
Going against the grain of the dominant scholarship on the
period, which generally ignores the impact of Jewish questions in
early modern England, James Shapiro presents how Elizabethans
imagined Jews to be utterly different from themselves----in
religion, race, nationality, and even sexuality. From strange cases
of Christians masquerading as Jews to bizarre proposals to settle
foreign Jews in Ireland, this book looks into the crisis of
cultural identity in Elizabethan England and sheds new light on
"The Merchant of Venice."
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